Full Contact on Queen Street

Photography Festival has the Message and the Medium but at the grand opening, where is the Media?

Friday photography show opening draws crowds but not the cameras

Hot show and very hot festival uses McLuren as inspiration but private launch runs cold with the media. What is the message here?

In 1974 I took a number of pictures of Marshall McLuhen as he addressed the media covering the annual Juno Awards. My close friend, Dave Tollington was working for RPM Magazine - the creators of the music award - and got me in the side door and let me take a half a roll of black and white film before shushing me away from the cooler filled with O'Keefe lager beer.My notes from that session are long gone. I don't remember anything he did say. I do know from my student newspaper tear sheet, that he did talk about popular culture to the people who promoted such big stars (back then) as Terry Jacks, Anne Murray, Stompin' Tom Connors, Murray McLaughlin and or course Valdy. McLuhen spoke the same day that Bachman-Turner Overdrive won a Juno as the upcoming group of 1974.Presumably McLuhen referenced his book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Written in 1951, the work is now seen as a pioneering study in the field of popular culture. He apparently derived the book title, The Mechanical Bride, from a painting created byt Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp.36-years later, camera still in hand, I covered a private reception marking the launch of the month-long Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival. Scotiabank Vice President John Doig lauched the festival as he stood at a podium inside the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto) against a backdrop of the oversized group photograph exhibition The Mechanical Bride. Both the show and the city-wide festival runs until June 6, 2010.The exhibition, curated by Bonnie Rubenstein, takes its name from McLuhan’s book, and the show emulates the late Canadian author's fascination with advertising and the media. Catalogue women in bras. Multi-screened projections of automobiles. Female legs in white knee-high stockings. Photographers and videographers including John Armstrong & Paul Collins, Dana Claxton, Kota Ezawa, Jacqueline Hassink, David LaChapelle, Ryan McGinley, Josephine Meckseper, Matt Siber and Alec Soth have works in this international show.Doig was the lead speaker at the MOCCA kick-off because Scotiabank is now the named sponsor of the 30-year festival. Scotiabank Contact is self-billed as the world's largest event of its kind.Standing in front of oversized pictures of women in various stages of undress, he praised MOCCA for its cutting edge exhibition schedule. Curator Bonnie Rubenstein says, according to the Canadian Press, that the photos that Doig stood in front of "particularly the one of the legs - are poignant as they're very similar to those in the 1951 book "The Mechanical Bride" by late Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan. His writings inspired this year's festival theme: pervasive influence.""I think it's quite fascinating for everyone to go back and look at Marshall McLuhan's book because I think it can tell us a lot about what images say in today's society." As for taking pictures of pictures that are part of a show inspired by a man I photographed at the start of my so-called career? Back in the day, things were easier. Marshall McLuhen was approachable. He was simply a guy on the stage in a smoke-filled room. The big performer names arrived by subway. There were no glasses for our bottles of beer. No guest list. No dressing up, or dressing down.Oversized photographs of bras, boots and car boots was out of range of RPM's budget. It was back before artists took themselves seriously and long before the media would create a litany of reasons as to why they couldn't report on a Canadian cultural event.The Toronto media has given the Contact Festival solid coverage, however the actual Scotiabank launch and preview of the Gallery show drew no mainstream media save for a camera crew from TVO Ontario and a BBC cultural reporter out of New York city.

CUTLINE: Top left - John Doig, the man in motion at the Scotiabank Contact Festival launch. Top right - The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art was filled to capacity to hear John Doig and preview the Mechanical Bride Exhibition.Middle right: Tourism Toronto's Joel Peters with Scotiabank Caribana's Bobbie Adore at the Mechanical Bride Exhibition opening.Bottom. John Doig in focus.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

By Stephen Weir Believe It or Not Toronto is finally going to have an aquarium. Work has already begun on a new building at the base of the world famous CN Tower. Even though it will be two years before the first Sand Tiger Shark and Carpenter Shark (sawfish) move into Shark Lagoon, three levels of government have already laid out the welcome mat for Ripley Entertainment, the owners of the future aquarium which is scheduled to open in 2013.At a late August press conference Canadian entrepreneurs, Jim Pattison Senior and Junior, officially launched the construction project. The Jim Pattison Group, one of the country’s largest private companies, owns Ripley Entertainment (Ripley’s Believe It or Not), and operates aquariums in both Tennessee and South Carolina.The new Toronto aquarium project has strong financial support and redevelopment monies from the Federal Government of Canada, the Province of Ontario and the City of Toronto…

Caribbean Vibration TV Alain Arthur 14-years on TV By Stephen Weir for the Caribbean Camera Every Saturday afternoon
for the past 14-years Alain Arthur has been warmly welcomed into hundreds of thousands
of households across Canada. He never gets old, he never gets fat (although wonder
where that hair went anyway?) and he always has positive, fun stories to tell
us about Caribbean Canadian culture. Not seen the show?
This Saturday at 5.30 pm. Omni TV will be airing the best travel stories of
2017 with visits to Trinidad, St Vincent, Dominica, Barbados and the
Bahamas.On the last Saturday of the
year Omni will be airingthe best Caribbean Vibration 2017 celebrity interviews,
including up close and personal chats with Machel Montana, PJ Puffy and many
other Soca stars. Caribbean Vibration TV for this year. The
show has a huge following not just on the Omni network, where each episode
is aired twice every week, but, it also runs five times a week on the
CaribVision Network in 14 different Cari…

Media manage to quickly link Eaton shooting with North America's largest Caribbean Canadian festival

Late last week I joked with my associate Craigg Slowly (@ThatTDotGuy) that it would be only a matter of time
before CFRB right wing on-air host Jerry Agar would link the Eaton Centre
shooting with the Caribbean Carnival Toronto (the carnival formally known as
Caribana). Don't know if Agar has taken a run at us yet, but, other media outlets
have indeed made the tenuous link between an inner-city gang shooting at the
Eaton Centre and North America's largest Caribbean cultural event. The Globe and Mail on Saturday did a feature on public safety at Yonge
and Dundas and somehow managed to use the Caribana name. The reporter,
Kelly Grant, listed some of the murders that had occurred near the Dundas /
Yonge intersection. In that list was the 2005 murder of a Brampton man in
Dundas Square - he was shot dead in front of police the day after the 2005 Caribana Parade had ended. It was r…

Like many other self-employed communicators in Toronto I have an exciting/active career. On one hand I am an active publicist working on many high profile projects including the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Toronto Caribbean Carnival and RBC Taylor Prize, Cundill Prize on the other, as a journalist I have one book published (The Sinking of the Mayflower) under my name and have ghost written two other books. I am the travel editor of Diver Magazine and I write travel stories, cultural stories and housing stories for a number of daily newspapers in Canada.I am a Huffington Post. For forty years I have been researching, watching and writing about the History of Diving in the Movies. In the pages of Diver Magazine and a variety of other publications, my articles have been titled Blood And Bubble movies. I have documented over 3,000 movies dating back to the 19th century that show actors/actresses diving or snorkeling on film. My website, with three Blogs and a photography section represent just four small aspects of my work. Always Busy. Never Bored. stephen@stephenweir.com.